Improved Advancing Front Mesh Algorithm with Pseudoislands as Internal Fronts
Publication: Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 140, Issue 4
Abstract
This paper presents an alternative implementation of the advancing front method for generating two-dimensional triangular unstructured meshes for finite-element applications. After initializing the front along the boundaries, internal fronts, called pseudoislands, are created inside the domain where a node-spacing function condition is met. When the element creation starts, several disjoint fronts are made active, one for each pseudoisland, and the temporal order of creation of the elements follows a smaller to bigger size sequence in an inside-to-outside propagation of the front. Postprocessing routines are available for enhancing the mesh quality. A test case for an idealized geometry shows the effectiveness of the method with high node-spacing function gradients. Several discretizations of a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) derived digital elevation model are compared for demonstrating the improvement of the new advancing front version with respect to the standard version in real applications. Finally, one of the meshes obtained with pseudoislands is used in a wet and dry tide modeling study, showing a superior resolution of the sharp bathymetric gradients and an improvement on the simulation of the wetting and drying process.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for providing the doctoral scholarship to the first author (SFRH/BD/61161/2009); the Portuguese Geographic Institute for making available the LIDAR data set; and Cristina Monteiro of the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute.
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Published In
Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 140 • Issue 4 • July 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 10, 2013
Accepted: Jan 13, 2014
Published online: Jan 15, 2014
Published in print: Jul 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Jul 26, 2014
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